Karen Schneider had an energizing warning for the conference attendees — for years now, libraries have given up ownership, control, and expertise in information management. We don’t own or build our catalogs and supporting — we rent embarrassingly poor systems from unresponsive vendors. We don’t catalog our own data (or when we do, we’ve brilliantly decided to pay OCLC for the privilege of doing this work) — again, we rent. We don’t even own the materials our customers need; this, too, is rented.

This made me think: I’m all in support of Google’s book digitization project, but… um… do we have any plan whatsoever for when our physical collection completely loses relevance? More to the point, if the entire function of libraries becomes that of collection managers (read: people who sign great huge checks to cartels of publishers)… well, how many librarians do we really need on campus, then?

Research is getting easier all the time — I know serious researchers that use Google Scholar almost exclusively… to very good effect. Teaching information literacy will be relevant only until incoming students have better information literacy skills than our instructional staff.

Anyone want to take bets on when that’ll happen?

Part of the answer, as demonstrated at this conference, is to take the power back. We need to start building things; we need to find new, better ways for customers to find information. Remember — librarians did this for centuries, until computers came along and scared everyone. Google isn’t the only company that can build a good search engine. And a concerted effort by a few institutions could take any of the commercial ILS vendors sitting down, as the Evergreen folk have shown.

We can do this. We need to totally change what we’re up to.

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One of my favorite tech authors, Jeremy Keith, has posted an interesting bit about streaming his life away. It seems that there could be library applications that would benefit from a similar effort if someone aggregated the RSS streams created while doing research.

For example, I just recently wrote an article with a colleage (have not heard about acceptance/rejection). We used Writeboard as a collaborative authoring tool. It produces an RSS feed for monitoring when someone updates the work. I could imagine combining this with a stream from a service like the Refworks citation manager. Pulling these feeds together with a citation database’s RSS or alert service feed the way Keith pulled together feeds from his iTunes, blogs, flickr, etc would provide an interesting picture of a person’s research activities.

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The dilution of research skills and the need for information literacy, a topic we have discussed frequently, has made its way to mainstream discussions once again: Searching for Dummies.

Also interesting is mention of another topic we debated, Wikipedia. The article cites a grass roots effort by grad students to put good information into the open encyclopedia.

Higher education is fighting back. Librarians are teaching “information literacy” and establishing alternative Web indexes. Graduate students, in the front lines as teaching assistants, are starting to discuss joining Wikipedia rather than fighting it, as many instructors still, quixotically, do.

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A List Apart ran two articles this week of reader contributions about what they love and hate about the Web. Thomas Bleijendaal, student, writes:

Seeking real good information on the internet (school stuff for example) is still very hard. If you try to find some good information about aerodynamics, it’s your day-job. I have been searching for hours, and the only things I found were things I already knew. The idea of the internet being one big library maybe there, but finding scientific information is a pain in the ass. Luckily there’s still an old-fashioned library with books and stuff, so I have been able to find what I was looking for. The internet really needs to grow a lot before it can take the role of being a really good “info-dealer.”

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I’ll leave this post open-ended, but I am curious to know, as a librarian, do you see yourself as a producer, consumer or provider of information? Granted these are not mutually exclusive…

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I have been a fan of the other ALA, A List Apart Magazine, for a couple of years now. I am greatful for a journal dedicated to standards-based web design that prioritizes none of those bolded words over the others. I tend to eschew extremism in the digital library realm of any kind. If your site is too flashy, literally or figuratively, you will probably do a disservice to your readers and sacrifice function/content to form. However, on the other end of the spectrum is dear old Jakob Nielson. Quite frankly, if librarians made websites that had the visual and aesthetic quality of useit.com’s lowest common denominator design, i.e., design elements sacrified to the usability gods, I fear we would reinforce a stereotype that libraries are the old world of information and not relevant to the 21st century information world.

Last week’s ALA feed included the article “Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign,” a great piece on the importance of moving away from web design for design’s sake only. What jumped out at me, though, was an analysis of Apple’s iLife software:

The new iLife packaging wasn’t just a redesign for the sake of redesigning. It seemed to represent much more than that. Personal computing was no longer something done to accomplish something else more efficiently, but rather a part of everyday life, even critical to communication and social interaction. The iPod, for example, was no longer only for the technorati; it was quickly becoming mainstream for coder and soccer mom alike. And that’s what the new packaging seemed to portray—less about technology, more about people.

What struck me as relevant to librarianship is the way that the highlighted sentence in this passage could be adapted for the realm of library services, especially instruction. In instruction sessions that I have participated in I find that one of the greatest challenges is getting across to students the point that what I am saying to them is relevant to their lives as students (remember the adage by Zweizig). The way that the author frames the transformation in the perception of Apple’s software has a counterpart for library materials. We need to present our collections and deliver them to patrons in a manner that puts them squarely in the middle of the patrons’ lives. I would try to appropriate the crucial sentense above for libraries by stating: library collections and services should not be used as a last resort when Google and Amazon don’t suffice. Rather, they should be a part of everyday life within your given community as a student, citizen.

Consequently, the challenge that I have been seeing in my own experiences is one of presentation.

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This is directly from the latest issue of OCLC Abstracts (I claim fair use in the spirit of collegial discussion):

In the report The Future of Libraries: Beginning the Great Transformation, the DaVinci Institute, a nonprofit futurist think tank, has put together 10 key trends that are affecting the development of the next generation library. They are:

1. Time compression is changing the lifestyle of library users
2. Libraries are transitioning from a center of information to a center of culture
3. We are transitioning from a product-based to an experience-based economy
4. The stage is being set for a new era of global systems
5. The demand for global information is growing exponentially
6. Over time, we will be transitioning to a verbal society
7. Search technology will become increasingly more complicated
8. We haven’t yet reached the ultimate small particle for storage, but will soon
9. All technology ends and all technologies commonly used today will be replaced by something new
10. Communication systems are continually changing the way people access information

Their recommendations:
1. Evaluate the library experience
2. Preserve the memories of your own communities
3. Embrace new information technologies
4. Experiment with creative spaces so the future role of the library can define itself

Thought provoking indeed! As thought provoking as Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes!

(I’m not going to comment on this just yet, but I thought others might like to make some comments on some of these points?)

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If you come from a state school, a land grant university, or another institution with a huge undergraduate population, chances are pretty good that bibliographic instruction (BI) is sexy right now. Instructing young people how to become “information literate,” meaning, “able to collect, interpret, and use information,” is reaching the top of the proverbial heap as far as priorities are concerned. Some schools even offer credit courses in research skills. Where can I find a journal article? What exactly is a “subject” and what is a “keyword”? How does this bibliographic management software work?

Without these skills, our students could end up with nearly clueless about how to do research and put that research into practice.

Some un-sexy places, though, don’t have credit courses for information literacy or even an established BI program in the library. So how does a librarian accomplish the goal of information literacy without teaching BI sessions or courses?

I hadn’t heard this phrase before a reference meeting this week, but part of the answer is the “teachable moment.” In other words, how much are our reference interviews also instructional sessions? As librarians, we need to remember that telling someone where they can find the microform room is not enough: we should tell them where the floor guides and maps are, too.

Maybe I wasn’t listening closely in library school, but it always seemed that reference was one initiative and instruction was another. It hadn’t been stressed enough (to me) that providing answers was really only cover – quick camouflage – for teaching someone how to find answers for themselves. And this counts for every interview to the extent that it’s possible.

I’m wondering if there are any anecdotes you all have about this? Any teachable moments to convey? Any stratagems? Any nerdy subterfuge?

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This morning’s Wall Street Journal ran the story “Peer Pressure: Scholarly Journals’ Premier Status Is Diluted by Web; More Research Is Free Online Amid Spurt of Start-Ups; Publishers’ Profits at Risk; A Revolt on UC’s Campuses.” The story traces how several groups are battling exorbitant academic journal prices – especially those available through proprietary, subscription-based full text databases – through open source, free web databases. When I hear about such sites I am excited; I do not work at a research library, and while we have ProQuest, I rely on free Internet sites to help my students research more than I’d like.

I have started to peruse such sites as Public Library of Science and arXiv, do any of you have any experience with these sites? They appear trustworthy, if not a bit out of the scope of what we teach at my school. In my research skills workshops I try to instill in the students that they should always scrutinize the sources they use on the free web.

Do you trust free, online journals databases? Would you suggest them to your patrons?

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